Economic Resilience and Antifragility: Classification of SMEs’ Shock Reactions based on Balance Sheet and Income Statement Data

The attribute of a company of being able to cope with unpredictable negative changes and crises is called resilience. Nevertheless, it is also possible not just to adapt to and survive economic distress periods, then even make benefit out of them. This latter phenomenon is often referred in literature as “antifragility” towards crises. In the present study a classification attempt is provided based on a novel definition of resilience and antifragility using balance sheet and income statement data from almost 26,000 small and medium-sized enterprises of the Hungarian processing industry. Logistic Regression and Random Forest models are used in order to predict a company’s resilient and/or antifragile behaviour to a sudden drop in its sales growth. The outlined work is a response to those numerous calls in literature that highlight the lack of reproducible numerical investigations based on accessible data and a tangible definition of economic resilience.